In This Corner: Comparing The IPad 2, Xoom, TouchPad and PlayBook

March 4, 2011 |

In This Corner: Comparing The IPad 2, Xoom, TouchPad and PlayBook

With such high-tech devices gracing the market and blog sites, it only seems fair to pit them against each other to see what makes a tablet what it is, and how much better it is over its competition. Engadget have done just that by creating a comparison tablet showing the specifications for the Apple iPad 2, the Motorola Xoom, the HP TouchPad and the BlackBerry PlayBook. Each tablet is a marvel in its own right, sporting some of the latest pieces of technological ingenuity and some even have room for upgrades. What’s great about being able to compare these four tablets is not only that they are leading the forefront in the tablet world, but also the fact that they each run on different platforms. Check after the break for more information on each tablet, as well as the comparison table that pits the the four against each other in a spec fight.

We have the iPad 2 with its iOS 4.3, the Motorola Xoom with the respected Android 3.0 Honeycomb (not showing any bias here), the HP TouchPad with its unique webOS 3.0 and the BlackBerry PlayBook with its very own BB Tablet OS (QNX). Another notable and important comparison would be their processors. First of all we can see that each tablet is powered by a dual-core processor – something that’s very much now in the norm – and clocked at 1GHz with the exception of the TouchPad that’s at 1.2GHz. As for what the processors are: the iPad 2 has an Apple A5, the Xoom has a NVIDIA Tegra 2, the TouchPad uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon and the PlayBook’s is the TI OMAP4430. On a more design point of view, we can see that the tablets all range in sizes. Starting from the biggest, the Xoom sports a grand 10.1-inch screen. Following close behind in a shared position are the TouchPad and iPad 2 at 9.7-inches. The smallest of the bunch is the PlayBook that has a 7-inch screen. The tablets are also in the same positions for their resolutions. The Xoom has 1280 x 800, the TouchPad and iPad 2 has 1024 x 768 and the PlayBook has 1024 x 600. As mentioned, these are the tablets that are ‘so-hot-right-now’, absenting other leading tablets from companies such as Asus, Samsung, Toshiba, Sony etc, but technology is going places and fast. We’ve already blogged about NVIDIA’s Kal-El – the Tegra 3 processor, and I’m sure there are hardware makers out there that will soon be unavailing their latest creations soon. Despite all that, we’re living in the present and right now we’ve got these tablets with these hardware specs. I’m sure we’ll be writing something similar when the next generation gets compared with one another. Check out the Engadget Comparison table after the break.